Haiti Trip Report: Part 4

Tuesday, February 23

- We got up early to get to the airport around 5:30. Our Haitian cab driver came and picked us up, and when we got to the airport, he gave me several little cards with $20 credits and his name and phone number. So, if I’m ever back in Santo Domingo, I’m calling him to come drive me around! I wish we’d gotten Dmitri’s number, too, but oh well.

- We got to San Juan, Puerto Rico at 8am and went through customs and immigration. We still had about 4 hours until our flight to Fort Lauderdale, so we went outside to see if there was anything nearby to do. Kery asked a guy standing on the sidewalk if he had any suggestions, and he said that we could take the bus to the beach (about a 5-minute drive) for seventy-five cents each. So we did . . . When we got off the bus, we walked down to the beach and walked by the water for a few minutes. It was very pretty.

- We went to a little diner for breakfast/lunch. I was feeling rather terrible by this point (I got a cold just about the time we arrived back in the DR), and so I downed two glasses of cranberry juice in the hopes that it’d help my throat. After we ate, we stopped by Walgreens so that I could get some souvenirs from Puerto Rico—cough drops and Kleenex J Then we got back on the bus and went back to the airport. We had a momentary little panic when we first got on the bus because the bus clock said that it was 1:10pm. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 1pm. Fortunately, we quickly discovered that the bus clock was wrong; it was really only 10:30am.

- We got back to Fort Lauderdale around 3:30pm. Kery went off to his flight to Ohio; I hung out down near baggage claim for an hour or two while waiting to find out when my flight would be and where I’d be staying that night. I ended up making a reservation at a Best Western near the airport and then took the shuttle to the hotel. The shuttle driver was very nice, and we ended up having a really good conversation about Haiti and how God is faithful even (especially!) in hard times. That was really neat.

- We got to the hotel, and I went in to check in. However, they couldn’t find my reservation; turns out that I was at the wrong Best Western. Apparently this happens all the time; there are two Best Westerns near the airport, and guests from the one hotel always end up at the other, and vice-versa. So I had to wait for the driver to come back and take me to the other hotel. I was so ready by then to be done with traveling for the day and just be in my room, but it wasn’t a big deal. It actually ended up being really cool because the driver and I got to continue our conversation about how God is working in our lives. So that was encouraging.

- The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. A guy that my dad works with used his frequent flyer miles to get me a flight back to Texas on Wednesday morning, which was wonderful. Paul picked me in Houston, and we got back to College Station late that afternoon. And let me just say, after over 48-hours of traveling, it was so good to be home!

- Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to all of you who have been praying for me and encouraging me! Please don’t stop; I’m heading back to Haiti and to Notre Maison March 10^th! J I really appreciate all of your prayers and support; I am completely serious when I say that this trip was only possible because of your willingness to participate from a distance! I’m so thankful and in awe of the way God has brought so many people into the working-out of all the details of this trip!

o Kery, thank you for taking time off work and on such short notice to come with me on this crazy little adventure. Thanks for being willing to help “wherever needed” and for all you did to figure out where we needed to be and how to get there; I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks for putting up with me—and for refraining from telling me I’m crazy the many times I said things that never really ended up making sense!

o Marci, you’re amazing, and I’m so thankful God put us both on that team in August! Thanks for suggesting that I contact Kery about this trip, and thank you for all of your prayers and encouragement and support. You are such a blessing to me!

o Lonnie, thanks for helping with all of the travel arrangements and for your encouragement!

o Kelsay, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to drive to FLL to give us the money for Gertrude and the phone! That was incredibly helpful; thank you!

o Liz, thanks for driving me to Austin at 3:30am J You’re fantastic.

o Leslie I., thank you for your prayers and your support!

o Leslie C., Anna, Jennifer, Cindy, Caitlin, Caroline, Paul, Christy, and the many others of you who have been praying, again, THANK YOU!!!

o All of my coworkers, thanks for covering shifts for me and for helping make it possible for me to go; y’all are wonderful!

Haiti Trip Report: Part 3

Sunday, February 21

- We were supposed to fly out of Port au Prince at noon. I spent time with the kids in the morning, and then around 10am, Germaine came to take us to the airport. When we got there, we waited in the line for 20 minutes or so before we made it to the front. We showed out passports to the lady checking the passenger lists, and she couldn’t find us. I showed her a copy of our reservation (which was with Spirit), and she said that she just had the lists for American Airlines. She pointed us to another guy, who was with AirFrance, and he said that Spirit had cancelled their flights. We tried to still get inside the airport to figure out what to do, but they wouldn’t let us in since we weren’t on any of the passenger lists. The AirFrance guy just told us to “go home” and then take a bus to the Dominican Republic to fly out from there. I was a bit amused by the “go home” part—yeah, that’s what we’re trying to do!

- We called Gertrude and let her know what was going on, and she sent Germaine to come get us. At first, finding out that our flight had been cancelled was kind of like a punch in the gut because I’d already said good-bye to the kids and had it in my mind that we were going back to the States. But I knew that God had a reason for changing our plans and that He’d work out a way for us to get home. I actually was kind of curious/excited then about what else God had for us on this little adventure.

- We went back to Gertrude’s and I spent some time online figuring out how to get back home. Gertrude told us about Capital Coach Line, which is the bus that she takes when she goes to Santo Domingo. So I looked it up, and it turned out that it was a little cheaper than the Caribe Tours bus that we’d taken to Port au Prince. We decided to go with that, getting us to Santo Domingo Monday afternoon, and I also got us a flight from the DR to Fort Lauderdale via Puerto Rico for Tuesday.

- I spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the kids, which was fantastic. I’m so thankful for that extra time with them. I sat on a mat near the tent in the yard for a long time with Gabi, Carly, and Christina. Carly was having such a fun time picking up rocks and giving them to me—she’d yell “whoa!” every time she put them in my hands. It was neat seeing her playing like that. I also spent some time teaching several of the boys some English phrases. We worked on “What is your name?” and “How old are you?”. They had a lot of fun with that. Later they tried their English out on Kery, which was really funny, because after they used up their two questions, they would come ask me how to say a word (hair, star, airplane, MINUSTAH, etc) and then go tell Kery that one word. They were cute.

Monday, February 22

- It took me a long time to fall asleep Sunday night—a lot on my mind, I guess—and I woke up several times throughout the night. Sometime around 3:30am, I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. Around 4:30, my bed started shaking. It probably only lasted about 10 seconds or so, and I kind of wondered if I was just dreaming or if it really was another aftershock. When I got up a few hours later and went downstairs, several of the Haitians were talking about it. Apparently it was a 4.7 aftershock. They kept saying, “Li te fó, fó, fó” (it was strong, strong, strong). A little while later, one of the nannies who had left for the night came back and said that near where she was in Carrefour, another house had fallen.

- I didn’t really have time with the kids before we had to leave to go to the bus, but I did bring Christina upstairs and held her while I ate breakfast. Then I said good-bye to Gertrude and the kids again, and we left. We got to the place where you buy the bus tickets around 7:30 or so; there are currently US troops staying at the bus terminal, so we had to buy our tickets through the fence and then go across the street and a little way down the road to get to the bus. When we got to the bus, we found out that though the bus was scheduled to leave at 10am (according to the website), it was actually going to be leaving in just a few minutes. We just made it!

- At the border, they told us to get off the bus and take our luggage to be inspected, but since Kery and I both just had backpacks, they just waved us away. Which was very good, considering my backpack is absolutely stuffed full and it’s not easy to make it all fit back in again! We were at the border for about an hour or so. My US cell phone started getting service again, so I was able to see several texts that had been sent to my phone over the past few days.

- I got to see more of the Dominican on this bus ride since I wasn’t exhausted like I’d been when we came. It’s a pretty country, especially the mountains J. It reminded me a lot of Ecuador as far as roads and houses and towns go. It’s much cleaner than Haiti.

- We got to the bus station in Santo Domingo around 4pm. We didn’t really have a plan, besides hopefully finding a not-too-expensive hotel. We actually ended up getting a Haitian taxi driver, who was very helpful. He took us to the Hotel Mango in Boca Chica, which is a little town over by the airport. And then the guy that helped us at the hotel was Haitian, too, so that was fantastic. I was much more comfortable with that—being able to speak Creole—than having to try to figure out Spanish! Our taxi driver even gave us a $10 discount on our ride and then arranged to come pick us up in the morning to go to the airport.

- After we checked into the hotel, we went in search of pizza. We ended up with a little Dominican man named Enrique who spoke a little English and decided to be our tour guide. Reminded me of a certain experience in Jacmel several years ago… So he had dinner with us, and since we were in a touristy area, we went into a few of the shops. Then we went down to the beach for a few minutes. The stars were beautiful.